Moons of Uranus - Names

Names

Main article: Naming of moons See also: Name conflicts of solar system objects

The first two Uranian moons, discovered in 1787, did not receive names until 1852, a year after two more moons had been discovered. The responsibility for naming was taken by John Herschel, son of the discoverer of Uranus. Herschel, instead of assigning names from Greek mythology, named the moons after magical spirits in English literature: the fairies Oberon and Titania from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air.

Subsequent names, rather than continuing the airy spirits theme (only Puck and Mab continued the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material. In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer Gerard Kuiper after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays and The Rape of the Lock (although at present only Ariel, Umbriel, and Belinda have names drawn from the latter; all the rest are from Shakespeare). At first, the outermost moons were all named after characters from one play, The Tempest; but with Margaret being named from Much Ado About Nothing that trend has ended.

• The Rape of the Lock (a poem by Alexander Pope):
  • Ariel, Umbriel, Belinda
• Plays by William Shakespeare:
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream: Titania, Oberon, Puck
  • The Tempest: (Ariel), Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, Ferdinand
  • King Lear: Cordelia
  • Hamlet: Ophelia
  • The Taming of the Shrew: Bianca
  • Troilus and Cressida: Cressida
  • Othello: Desdemona
  • Romeo and Juliet: Juliet, Mab
  • The Merchant of Venice: Portia
  • As You Like It: Rosalind
  • Much Ado About Nothing: Margaret
  • The Winter's Tale: Perdita
  • Timon of Athens: Cupid

Some asteroids share names with moons of Uranus: 171 Ophelia, 218 Bianca, 593 Titania, 666 Desdemona, 763 Cupido, and 2758 Cordelia.